Everything’s there for a reason, though, from the old-skool welded gusset at the head tube junction – which reinforces this vulnerable area to protect it against damage from hard impacts – to the radically oversized hollow main pivot bearing. The i-Drive XCR is no exception, with a utilitarian appearance that you’ll either love or hate. I-Drive bikes have never been front-runners in the looks department.
It’s hard to describe, but it works well. The linkage and tether combine to move the bottom bracket housing very slightly rearwards as the suspension moves through its travel, minimising pedal feedback in the process. The bottom bracket sits in its own housing, which is connected to a large pivot on the swingarm via a short linkage and anchored to the underside of the down tube with a dog-legged I-beam tether. The swingarm rotates around a large pivot at the bottom of the down tube and drives the shock directly, much like a standard single pivot swingarm bike.
GT id5 i-drive xcr: gt id5 i-drive xcr Steve Behr Frame: Heavy and won’t win any prizes for its looks, but i-Drive suspension works wellĪlthough GT long ago moved the i-Drive mechanism out of the oversized bottom bracket shell into the open, it still flummoxes a lot of people. On the plus side, the high pivot means the bike carries speed extremely well and is a cinch to manual through dips. Big gear mashers, consider yourselves warned. The wide handlebar stance and short cockpit don’t encourage out-of-the-saddle efforts uphill – and that’s just as well, because the complete lack of compression damping or lockout on the fork makes for a wallowy, bouncy front end that’s distracting at best. But it’s surprisingly adept on the kind of technical climbs that can unsettle tauter full-sussers, the i-Drive system giving the rear wheel an impressive ground-hugging ability which almost – but not quite – makes up for the tyres’ lacklustre grip in the wet. It’s not quite a junior freerider – it’s not burly enough for that – but cashing in gravity credits is certainly where it’s most at home.Įarning those credits takes a little more work, thanks in part to the i-Drive XCR’s slightly overweight build. Point it down a rocky chute, let the brakes off and find yourself at the bottom in no time at all and wearing a very big grin.Ī well-matched fork and rear end work well in tandem to deliver seemingly bottomless rock-sucking ability. What the GT does do – very well indeed – is fun.
Weighing in at a relatively portly 32lb, that’s probably a good thing.
This isn’t a bike that’s trying to be the lightest, fastest, most efficient machine from A to B. There’s something about the GT that sets it apart from the crowd of do-everything 120mm bikes.